Known telemarketing systems and methods utilize a telemarketing center (also called a "call center") to provide sales and product information to purchasers. The call center is a collection of marketing agents, supervisors, and telecommunications systems located in a single geographic location. The call center is generally connected to a network (such as the public switched telephone network) to which customers are connected. The telemarketing system implements telemarketing features (e.g., call routing) and telecommunications features (e.g., call center switch management) together.
A customer wishing to make a purchase is provided with a single telephone number, generally through advertisements. Upon dialing the number, the customer is connected to specialized telemarketing telecommunications equipment that has been specially configured to route the incoming call. Some systems are provided with an automated series of announcements that solicit additional information from the customer, which the customer provides by selecting options by pressing the appropriate button on his telephone touch pad. Other systems accept simple voice responses. This additional information is used by the telemarketing telecommunications equipment to decide how to route the call.
A call may be routed to an appropriate agent, to a queue if all appropriate agents are busy, or to a voicemail system on which the customer may leave a message. An appropriate agent is selected to receive an incoming call on any of a host of parameters, including particular agent skills, customer priority, customer responses to an automated inquiry system, time-of-day, and queue sizes.
Known systems are also able to initiate a call from an agent to a customer. This is commonly used in solicitations for bank credit cards, charitable contributions, and magazine subscriptions. The systems provide extensive call data recording, analysis, and reporting capabilities, as well as call-monitoring by supervisors. Call data may include such parameters as mean time spent per call, queuing delays, the number of incoming and/or outgoing calls, and agent workload.
These features are implemented using special software and hardware that is customized to accommodate the particular needs of each telemarketing call center. One vendor's hardware and software is rarely compatible with that of another. Thus, one vendor's component which may be best suited for a particular application may not operate with other call center components made by other vendors. The need to specially configure a substantial amount of software and hardware for each telemarketing center adds significantly to the cost of implementing known telemarketing systems.
Another disadvantage of known telemarketing systems in which the call is initiated by the customer is that the call is queued if all agents are busy. While the call is queued, the customer is on hold until one of the agents becomes available. The telemarketer or customer must pay for the connection and for any announcement provided to the waiting customer, in addition to any actual conversation time. It would be advantageous to delay establishing a connection at all until an agent is actually available.
Because known telemarketing systems implement telemarketing and telecommunications features together, such systems are usually large and complex. Telemarketing software must be customized and often comprises millions of lines of source code, and is expensive and time consuming to modify or enhance. Telemarketing hardware must be specially configured for each application, resulting in a hardware system that is inflexible and expensive to change. A better system would implement telemarketing functions separately from the underlying telecommunications functions. In that case, a required change in the telemarketing logic could be effectuated more easily because it would not directly involve the telecommunications control software. Further, the telemarketing functions would be portable among a variety of hardware platforms, which could be utilized to best and most economically support the objectives of the telemarketer.
It should further be noted that telemarketing functions supported by various call center vendors differ from vendor to vendor. Thus, a telemarketer with more than one call center may be unable to offer the same telemarketing functionality from one call center to anther, limiting the possibility of resource sharing. For example, is a first call center is exceptionally busy, it may not be possible to divert the overflow to a second call center because the second call center is implemented with products from another vendor, or else is implemented with products from the same vendor that are configured differently. This problem could also arise if the architectures of calling centers are different. For instance, a first call center with agents connected by local area network may not be easily reconfigured to handle calls normally taken by a second call center whose agents are connected directly to a call center switch on the premises. A better system would provide call center functionality regardless of the location and connectivity of diverse agent resources. This could be achieved by properly separating telemarketing functions from telecommunications functions.
Further, by separating telemarketing functionality from specific underlying telecommunications technology, telemarketing architects would be able to offer a uniform set of agent, customer, and supervisor interfaces that operate with switching equipment from multiple vendors which has been integrated to provide optimal telecommunications for the telemarketing application.
Implementing the customer interface through a hypertext network would be another improvement over known systems that require a customer to respond to a tedious set of questions by entering responses on the customer's telephone touch pad. Product information is also much more easily presented to the customer through a hypertext network, especially one which can handle multimedia information, including text, graphic, audio, video and animation media.
Known systems implement certain telemarketing functions through a hypertext network. However, these systems utilize the hypertext network only outside of the call center. For example, in one known system, a customer requests a telephone connection to a sales agent at a traditional call center by selecting a feature on a hypertext page transmitted to the customer over the Internet. However, the architecture of the call center itself, with its centralized, customized hardware and software, remain the same as known systems. A better system would provide the advantages of hypertext networking to telemarketing, thus revolutionizing the call center by freeing it from having to exist at a single geographic location, profoundly reducing the necessity for custom-designed hardware and software, and providing the first truly portable telemarketing system that can operate easily from platform to platform and from network to network.